Milestones From My First Year as a New Grad Software Engineer
By: Jordan Flores, Associate Software Engineer
Before I started working at Veeva — my first job out of college — I didn’t know what to expect. I was filled with uncertainty as I was about to enter the workforce and see if Veeva had made the right decision in choosing me as a software engineer. The journey I went through during my first year as a new employee taught me a lot and I wanted to share the types of things you might experience in your first year as a developer.
The First Day
The first day at a new job is nerve-racking — it’s filled with new teammates, a new office (when COVID-19 wasn’t a thing), and new challenges. A keycard with your photo is the first trophy that proves you are a real employee and you’re presented with a top-level overview of the company to help understand the Vision and Values that drive Veeva to best help the life sciences industry. The excitement of all of the unknowns begins to become more manageable once you are assigned your workstation, meet your teammates, and talk with your manager. Ironically, the manager that was recently grilling you with technical problems and questions about your experience during the interview process is now your greatest asset to help you get accustomed to your position and start your career.
The First Week
The first week is filled with tasks that should seem boring, such as setting up your environment, understanding the product your team is working on, and reading company policies. These slow-paced but necessary items are welcome, however, since you are still getting bombarded with the stimulus of meeting new people and understanding the friendly culture. Around this time, you’ll generally start making friends and finding people with similar interests to you (I found an awesome group that plays Super Smash Bros. after work). Your code buddy will be your go-to person when it comes to the multitude of technical issues and general questions that you will have throughout your onboarding. Your manager will start assigning you small defects so you can begin gaining exposure to the large codebase and the routine of developing, testing, reviewing, and merging your first lines of code to stamp your mark on the application.
The First Feature
Now that you have a decent understanding of how the application works and where to find things in the codebase and documentation, you can start to work on a feature! Since you won’t have all the knowledge to build your enhancement by yourself, you’ll likely be leaning on your code buddy, manager, and more experienced developers on your team to guide the feature to completion. There are multiple stages to completing a feature: design plan, implementation plan, development and testing, and finally presenting your shippable product to the team! These different steps push you to meet your true potential as a well-rounded developer, not just through strengthening your coding skills, but also by developing your communication and organizational skills. You have to closely work with your Quality Assurance Engineers to make sure that the feature is thoroughly tested and safe to release. Your Product Manager will guide you through the feature’s design and business use case and will rely on you as an advisor on how to best implement the feature. As part of the AGILE process, you will communicate with your Dev Manager to make sure incremental progress is being made in order to understand when the feature is expected to be delivered and whether or not you need help from the team to complete it in case things go awry. After you’ve completed your first feature, you can pat yourself on the back for a job well done and look forward to the next feature coming your way!
The First Year
As you continue to work on features and fix issues with the application, you’ll also improve your technical and soft skills, getting better and better the more you live in the codebase. With every feature you develop, you gain more confidence in the application and start to own areas of the code you’ve developed. Team members and co-workers from other teams will ask you for help in your areas of expertise as you become an even more critical member of the company. You will have time to work with your manager to set your career goals and action items in order to achieve your definition of success, whether it means working on your programming fundamentals or exploring new areas of the application.
My first year at Veeva was challenging, especially with COVID-19 disrupting the flow mid-way through, but I have learned a lot and met many talented people whom I can look up to. I am looking forward to growing with Veeva this next year and to hopefully being reunited in person again!
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Veeva.
